BY THE END
OF THIS ARTICLE…..

….. You’ll understand why the core question you need to ask yourself is “Is my child emotionally and mentally ready for college?” NOT “Does my kid have the aptitude for college?”

As physician
Louis Profeta says, “The former question
is infinitely more important to consider than the latter.”

Who has the most realistic
perspective on whether your high school student or the typical high school
student is truly ready for college…..?

…..Parents? But parents for the most part don’t think of
college right after high school as a decision as much as much as part of a
Developmental Ritual. Isn’t college part of trying to live the
American Dream?

……Students? But students often feel such
an immense amount of pressure to immediately go to college that they don’t even truly
consider other options, such as a gap year, or a year of working, or…?

The problem
is college is NOT a de facto summer camp, and is NOT a surrogate parent. It is NOT a place to grow up. It is a place where one takes classes based on
THE ASSUMPTION that the teenager has a pre-existing deep-seated knowledge about
themselves. But do they?

How about an Emergency Room doctor
who has worked with hundreds of college students who found themselves in the
worst of situations? Like Loius Profeta, MD, who became an
author, public speaker, and is also a father and husband. He recently wrote an intriguing article entitled “A
Very Dangerous Place for a Child is College.”

WARNING: There are some curse words
in this article, and this article uses some frank language.

This is not
to say there are no parents or students who have enough maturity and insight to
send their child to college ready enough to succeed at college.

But the fact
of the matter is, there are reliable
statistics indicating that a very large grouping of high school graduates are not truly ready for what I call the College
Bus Station (CBS).

I
wrote about the college bus station in a recent blog. Because college students on average
change their major six times during college, one of the greatest problems is
students do not know themselves enough to go into college with a clear plan of
how to precisely choose classes that build on themselves in order to provide a
ramp toward a career and a job or graduate program after college graduation.

As Profeta writes about in his
article, freshman college students often make the biggest mistakes because
their newfound freedom does not come with an elevated sense of maturity or
responsibility simply because they are biologically a-year-older.

There are many religions in the world
that have a ritual of having high school age students take a year or two to ground
themselves, determine
what their values are in a very serious manner, and rub up against the real
world in a way that being in school does not offer.

Attending high school or college classes
full-time does not aggressively force the student to rub up against the reality
of the working world.

After having
worked with over 1000 children and adolescents over the last 15 years, I’m
increasingly of the opinion that for a very large grouping of high school
students, their best option would be to take a Gap Year to do the following:

— Truly figure out what they are
meant to do if they have not already, by engaging in a truly comprehensive
vocational/career guidance process that turns them inside out. See
my process here.Too many high school students go
through superficial career guidance processes, and that is why most college
students end up changing majors
approximately SIX times.

— Work in
the real world and come to understand JUST
HOW LUCKY THEY WOULD BE IF THEY DID GO ON TO COLLEGE.

— Experience
a world where they have much less protection than they have ever had
previously, especially parental protection.

— Aggressively rub up against the
realities of the mundaneness of working in a lower level job, the day in and day out, how hard it
is to earn money, how difficult it can be to work for a supervisor, not just
the teacher. While earning a bad grade
can be difficult, being reprimanded in the real world can take on a much more
difficult to swallow sourness.

This experience can help the
post-high school graduate appreciate any further learning opportunity much more
richly than they may have if they went from their high school bubble directly to their college
campus party bubble. In many ways the
bloated nature of colleges provides students with an extension of the bubble-like
experience they have living at home with their parents, where everything is
paid for.

Before you get focused on sending
your child off to the college you can brag the most about, take a
look at the statistics, and ask yourself whether you should consider a gap year for
your child before they go to college.

While the
idea of a Gap Year can be hard to swallow,
it may be the pill your child needs to swallow so that when they go to college
they don’t end up in the Emergency Room!!!